Sound module countdown

The sound module asks that we submit a 2-3 minute sound piece, obviously not wanting to make it easy for myself, I am going to create two, to play with mood and emotion. I have my video very nearly finalised, but no you can’t see it.

Interestingly when I showed it to my peer group at college, they were already interpreting the footage in many different way, with alternate storylines, and this without a soundtrack. Maybe this is an indicator of how much we need to see to be involved with the sound…

Or maybe I have got it wrong to use a visual piece to try and drive very differing emotions. But that’s me I’m a very visual person.

So the piece is ready, I just want to add a few fades, dips and ghosts over the vanilla video, so it lends itself to emotion.

Looking through my audio recordings and experiments, I know which bits worked best and those I would like to use for this module.

I have booked in for two sessions in the sound studio and hope to be on time and not too stressed.

In my last group tutorial with Suzie, she could see that I was wrangling with the question of how to make happy music/soundtrack for my experiment and she thought I should look at what parameters I would allow myself. I am torn between purely creating the sound design from found or recorded sound effects, rather than using music to get my emotional message across. I have come to the conclusion that for the purpose of this experiment I should allow myself to use music, and will be using a piece of my ukulele playing as I feel it is almost integral -for me – to connect music with upbeat/happy thoughts, it’s just the way I am…

The visuals that didn’t quite make it.

I knew pretty much from the beginning of this module that I would need to have visuals to work to and tried a couple of different things before settling on my piece. The reason that they didn’t work – I felt – was because they had no narrative to them, I got some lovely shots and the images looked how I wanted them to look, but they were too disjointed, but here are the rejects.

This is my random around Norwich sequence, I storyboarded what I wanted and managed to get most of it shot in two days, but when I came to put it together, I felt, it just didn’t work as a sequence and for my sound module, even though it’s supposed to be about the sound, I needed to have something with a little more narrative structure.

After the Norwich sequence didn’t quite work for me, and maybe it just needed a soundtrack to pull it together, but I wouldn’t have been happy working on it. I then looked to create a narrative using my to hand actress – my youngest Daughter. I found her drawing in the front room and with the sun streaming through the window it lit her face up beautifully, and it instantly fired my imagination to use a central character to drive some narrative.

I intersposed her drawing with the tap dripping to give a sense of time and waiting, but in the edit, although it looks lovely, it just didn’t go anywhere , this was mostly down to seeing something visually beautiful, but not having any thought behind it go into it… I needed to storyboard this idea a little more with a central character. Which is exactly what I did to get the sequence I am now using.